Quote:
Originally Posted by torqdork
My worries are about the future of the Scion brand altogether. There's been threads full of speculation that in the past I blew off as sensational until yesterday. Scion corporate district manager positions were eliminated as they rolled everything into the Toyota side where the Toyota district managers consider Scion a sideshow to their main objective, volume. Nobody was fired, they're doing other corporate jobs, but combined with TMS blessing dealers wishing to voluntarily terminate the Scion franchise gives pause about the future of the Scion brand.
We could be driving orphans or collectibles, I'm not sure which, but Tada-san's plans give hope that FR-S will continue for at least one 6-7 year product cycle with continuous upgrades.
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The Scion brand is definitely in trouble. Outside of the FR-S and the iQ their product lineup is very old and again outside of the FR-S and this time the tC the sales are very discouraging. A supposed new xB is scheduled to arrive for the MY 2016. The problem with this wait...the Kia Soul is having the xB's lunch and dinner, along with the Nissan Cube.
On the event of the brand's demise though, if Toyota feels the FR-S sells strongly enough it'll just be rebranded as the GT86 or even keep its FRS name. This has happened before with the Datsun brand going away for Nissan. The PT Cruiser was originally going to be a Plymouth but with that brand being mothballed it became the Chrysler PT Cruiser. No other company operates like GM where their brands have sway over the corporation with too much overlap causing problems when there are orphaned models.